In his slippery way, Goodell is the only man in the game who perfectly understands his role and his future. He is the focal point of all the understandable rage that accompanies the game’s slow decline.

He’ll listen to your problems, but first suffer him to go unto the little children.

Roger Goodell’s first act before his annual absorption of grievances on Friday was to introduce himself to the most famous female football player in America.

“The commissioner is just meeting with Sam Gordon, the 9-year-old YouTube star,” one of his flunkies announces from the podium.

The guys in the bulky suits and earbuds hover menacingly. Sam’s giving Goodell a sweet ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ sort of look.

This is Goodell’s life now; he needs kids for PR cover and bodyguards for the other sort.

You can consult a list of drinking holes in New Orleans where Goodell is barred. Many of them are displaying posters with the commissioner’s mugshot and a command: “Do not serve this man.”

This is a city where they will continue to feed you liquor to and reasonably past the point of unconsciousness, but Goodell can’t get a seltzer.

A few days ago, he was the inspiration behind several floats in a gleefully gutter-minded Krewe de Vieux parade. None of them can be advisedly described in a family newspaper.

It’s grimly amusing to watch so much civic angst from a safe distance, but it’s also wrong.

Goodell isn’t to blame for half the things he catches flak for, and the least of them is the charge that he blew this city’s chance at a home game in the Super Bowl. The players and coaches who allowed themselves to be caught on tape talking about the Saints’ bounty culture did that. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with bounties. What are their salaries but taxable bounties?

However, men who work on this big a stage should know that it’s theatre —appearances matter. The Saints’ mistake wasn’t paying players to injure, it was allowing people to find out they did that.

This is the most trifling of Goodell’s many problems, and so the only one he seemed comfortable laughing about.

When asked if he felt like he was working “behind enemy lines,” Goodell tried out a clumsy, scripted joke.

“I couldn’t feel more welcome here. My picture’s in every restaurant. I had a float in the Mardi Gras parade. We got a voodoo doll,” Goodell said, without benefit of a laugh track. “I’m serious. The people here have been incredible.”

Goodell could happily have gone on about BountyGate the whole time. The ground beneath that position is bedrock, so much so that he felt inclined to chide the city for doubting him.

“My biggest regret is that we aren’t all recognizing that this is a collective responsibility to get (bounties) out of the game,” Goodell said. “That’s what I regret, that I wasn’t able to make that point clearly enough.”

Translation: Don’t talk back to your father.

That should smooth things over.

It was everywhere else that Goodell, in his own impressively animatronic way, was rhetorically juking.

It all reduces to health and safety.

What’s he got on that? Nothing. Still.

His newest idea is to put a neurosurgeon on the sidelines of every NFL game. What are they supposed to do? Operate?

At the end of each season, every player will now undergo a three-day exit interview to “evaluate them from a mental, physical and life-skills standpoint.”

‘Life-skills’. Presumably the ones that discourage you from murdering people.

Up near the front, Sam sat holding her father’s hand, yawning every now and then. Who knew football could be so boring?

On Thursday, the players’ union claimed that an internal poll showed that 78 per cent of players do not believe team medical staffs have their best interests in mind. As a result, they demanded an independent safety czar to oversee all diagnosis and treatment issues.

Goodell first seemed annoyed that the issue had been raised in public before he could massage it behind the scenes. Then he began connecting words without making any sense.

“I can’t appoint somebody who’s going to make the game safer as an individual,” Goodell said. “That’s all of our responsibilities.”

So he won’t do it, and no one else can. Therefore it can’t be done.

Goodell’s sophistry gets at the core of the overarching issue facing football — it’s a fatal endeavor. Any genuinely independent official charged with ensuring player safety has only one intellectually honest route — to stop them from playing.

This is the entirety of Goodell’s problem, the one he can’t talk about in comprehensible English.

He has this league running at red-line RPMs, enjoying unparalleled continental support, earning $9 billion (U.S.) a year, but he can see the wall coming. As currently constructed, this is not a sustainable enterprise.

Eventually, one of the head-injury lawsuits — and most ominously the one that involves one-third of all the men who have ever played in the league — is going to stick. When that happens, things will start coming apart quickly.

Goodell understands that the players — his sometimes allies, and oftentimes enemies — are not a voting bloc. They are crucially divided into two camps — the ones who are playing and the ones who have played.

The ones currently playing are willing — anxious, even — to both absorb calamitous injuries and to calamitously injure each other. The Saints proved that. Ravens safety Bernard Pollard reinforced it this week when he predicted the league’s demise in 30 years because it’s not violent enough.

Their perspective changes once they retire.

It’s one thing to live with pain as a young man, and another to live it alone and uncelebrated later in life. Without the rush of Sunday, there’s too much room for regret.

Goodell is the man who must manage these two solitudes, and they hate him for it.

Goodell is the one who must cloak a gladiator culture and the capitalist instinct that drives it in bromides about fortitude and inspiration.

Goodell is Big Oil and Big Tobacco, but out there in the spotlight. His business hurts people, but his employees want to be hurt. Worse, his customers want to watch people being hurt.

They don’t blame themselves for the human wreckage.

They blame him.

And so, in his slippery way, Goodell is the only man in the game who perfectly understands his role and his future. He is the focal point of all the understandable rage that accompanies the game’s slow decline.

He is the NFL’s sin eater.

That he is so roundly disliked is only proof that he’s good at his job.

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